Those lovely people at Wikio have emailed The Voice with their list^ of the top blogs in the UK in June 2009.
(Lib Dem blogger Jennie Rigg has already published the list of top 30 politics blogs: below is the full list for all blogs, though there’s considerable overlap between the two owing to the dominance of politics blogs in Wikio’s weightings.)
^ Here’s the Wikio explanation of their ratings:
How are these rankings compiled?
The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.
Only links found in the RSS feed are included. Blogrolls are not taken into account, and the weight of any given link increases according to how recently it was published. We thus hope to provide a classification that is more representative of the current influence levels of the blogs therein.
Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.
Our rankings are updated on a monthly basis and also include Top Blogs for several categories: Technology, Politics, etc. New categories will be added on a regular basis.
13 Comments
That’s a very interesting list, Stephen. Are all of the top 30 anonymous blogs?
That’s an impressive list. Quiet month was it?
(sadly, when this page inevitably gets corrected, no-one will appreciate my scintellating wit)
Very amusing, James.
The collective wisdom of the blogosphere?
Turns out that doing a copy and paste from an email forwarded from one person to another which includes HTML is never a great idea. URLs appeared multiple times and broke the layout.
Congratulations to Charlotte. Over the last two or three months both Charlotte and James have managed big jumps in months when their blogging’s been relatively light. Perhaps a lesson there somewhere…
Congrats also to Mark Thompson on his continued charge up the charts, although just outside the all-blog top 30.
One day I’ll figure out whether Wikio rankings mean anything. Until then I’ll keep on assuming that they do in months when I go up and that they’re meaningless in months when I go down. Self-delusion – that’s the trick.
Who the flaming hell is reading some of these “top” blogs?
I’ve got no idea how half of them became popular. It enrages me that more deserving bloggers remain obscure.
Odd case in point, Squiff, that may give a hint to what happens. Bad Science is at 19 and we’re at 7, yet when Ben linked to us earlier this month (I feel I can call him Ben; he did link to us after all) we had our best hits day for aeons. Links and reach are clearly totally different things. I guess LDV has a status as a sort of “reference point” for a large number of specialist blogs, so they all link to it all the time, whereas Bad Science is something ordinary people actually read
in the same way they read the newspaper sites of a morning.
Hm, actually “aeons” = since the local elections. It was a good day, basically.
Umm, I’m pretty sure that the rankings are last months,
ie, the list is nearly a month old.
July’s should be out in a couple of days.
Confused – no, these are a sneak preview of the Wikio ratings which will be published on their site on Sunday.
I’m not sure how much they’ve changed from May’s ratings, though.
Alix makes a very good point in her comment when she talks about the difference between the number of links (with proportionate weighting from the more influential blogs) and reach. I was linked to by Ben Goldacre during my Safe seats/expenses thing in May and tracking my analytics I got a lot of hits from Bad Science (several hundred) and it was only in his side-bar not even linked to from one of his main articles.
I also noticed in June that I had a post linked to by Conservative Home (again just in one of their side-bar widget things) and got over 250 hits from it. I also had a post linked to from LabourList actually in the body and got around 60 or so hits. But in the Wikio rankings Labourlist is way ahead of Con Home so you might have expected it to be the other way round.